spaced with desolate evenness above the
scalded valley. “They covered these moun-
tains in bubble wrap,” Stu said, an anal-
ogy that was lost on my daughter. A new
fire was burning in the Great Scar, for-
merly Southwest Portland. Wind tur-
bines turned below us like huge flaming
dandelions. None of this surprised my
daughter. What raised her from her stu-
por was a flash of green. “Are those real
trees, Dad?” More mysterious than the
choking dust storms and orange skies,
harder to comprehend than the Great
Scar or the Red Zones, these pockets of
inexplicable green health baffle us all.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,”
Stu said, hovering over a small hilltop
clearing half a mile from the school and
tossing out the rope ladder.
After Stu flew off, we made camp,
“we” being a touch generous; Starling
kept jumping from rock to rock, staring
into the canopy of leaves. The plan was
that we’d spend the night here and get
picked up by Stu at dawn. I felt almost
giddy—we were far from the sweep of
her mother’s monitoring eye and the
blue sinkhole of the Hololite. The top-
pled firs and pines had made a path for
us—a raised walkway through the un-
dergrowth. I watched with a rush of
pride as Starling stretched out her arms
to balance on the wild red trapeze of a
quake-felled ponderosa.
When the carbon sinks of the world’s
forests began to burn—exhaling centu-
ries’ worth of carbon, in a protracted death
rattle that continues to this day—mil-
lions of birds were dispossessed. Now
the ghosts return to nest in their old
homes. With the right equipment, you
can sometimes hear them, even in the
domed cities. Often a ghost sings for
months and never materializes, and a
paranormal birder must make the iden-
tification from sound alone. This is a skill
that I hope to teach Starling. Not just
the waiting and the listening but theopenness to revelation. Which is another
way of saying, to being wrong about what
is possible and true.
We began our descent down the low
hill toward the pale-brick ruins of Chap-
man Elementary. The front entrance ap-
peared to have caved in a long time ago,
the once white columns leaning like
green dominoes, but I was reasonably
confident that we could get in through
the gymnasium. The building was con-
structed in the Classical Revival style, I
told my daughter, America’s loose inter-
pretation of Europe’s severe ideals. I
pointed out the broken pediment over
the entry door, the double-hung rectan-
gular windows through which we could
see shining leaves in the second-story
classrooms.
“Geez,” Starling said. “Who went
to school here? Future senators? Fern-
eating dinosaurs?”
Chapman Elementary had not been
destroyed, and this had everything to do
with humans’ love of Vaux’s swifts. Birds
were the reason the chimney still grazed
the clouds, a factory-style smokestack
with a Dickensian vibe, far better pre-
served than the ruins of downtown Port-
land. Thick silver cables made a triangle
around the smokestack—the seismic-sta-
bilization system that had saved the
school when Quake 7 flattened the city.
“Why do these ghosts like chimneys?”
Starling asked me, and I explained that
the swifts had been forced into the ar-
rangement by humans, who clear-cut the
woods and encroached on their homes.
When the birds were unable to locate
old-growth snags, they adapted to a stone
forest of millworks and smokestacks.
Later, small bands of humans worked to
protect the “chimney corridor.” Layering
their feathery bodies over one another,
the swifts huddled together on cold
nights, revived at daybreak by the sun-
warmed bricks.
“You turn that boiler on, and you’re
going to kill fifteen thousand swifts,” a
biologist from Portland Audubon told
the Chapman Elementary schoolchil-
dren. So they voted to retire their fur-
nace, piling on parkas and shivering at
their desks until the last birds left. The
children changed their plumage to save
the swifts.
Starling yawned at me, theatrically
unmoved by this fable. Before leaving on
our trip, we had sat on Starling’s bed and